Parole is an open source, modern, simple, easy-to-use and free graphical software that aims to be the default media player for the Xfce desktop environment. It is backed by the powerful GStreamer framework, which is used by default on many modern distribution of GNU/Linux.

Being engineered with simplicity, resource usage and speed in mind, Parole fits very well in the lightweight Xfce desktop environment, from which it requires various libraries and tools to work properly, especially when used on other open source desktop environments.

Media files can be played from local or remote locations

Key features include support for playing local media files, including DVD-Video, Video-CD, Super Video-CD, live streams, as well as any other video and audio file format supported by GStreamer, support for playing video files with subtitle, support for playing remote files located on the network, repeat and shuffle support, built-in playlist, as well as full-screen support.

Another interesting feature is that Parole is highly extensible through plugins, which can be installed the same why you’ve installed the software, from the main software repositories of your distribution. By default, it comes with two plugins, one for minimizing the application to tray and another one for displaying notification of events.

Minimal and intuitive graphical user interface

Parole’s best feature is its minimal and intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), which follows the keep it simple stupid (KISS) principle, offering users all the playback commands they need in a single window.

Video and audio files can be dragged and dropped into the main window in order to be played back, you can select audio channels (if multiple are available for a given video file) from the Audio menu, change the aspect ratio, as well as to select a subtitle.

You can change brightness, contrast, hue and saturation

From the Preferences dialog, which is accessible via the Edit menu, users can disable the screensaver while playing video files, enable visualizations when playing audio files, enable support for keyboard multimedia keys, change brightness, contrast, hue and saturation settings, change the font and character encoding for subtitles, and change various playlist options.

Parole was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on January 7th, 2015